While Las Vegas' iconic tower, the legacy of hypemaster extraordinaire Bob "the Polish Maverick" Stupak and the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, has seen its fair share of suicide jumpers over the years, we’re sorry to report, had any of the thrill rides atop the Stratosphere been involved in a fatal or even serious accident, then we very much doubt that it would still be operational today.
Although between them the Big Shot, SkyJump, Insanity, and X-Scream provide perhaps the greatest concentration of stomach-churning adrenaline-pumping excitement in Sin City (other than on those occasions when wild animals randomly break loose in North Las Vegas), we are not aware of any serious casualties having occurred over the years, although that’s not to say there haven't been incidents involving some unscheduled excitement...
The first of the Stratosphere's rides was the High Roller, which debuted with the tower back in 1996, thereby predating the new and totally unconnected High Roller observation wheel by almost two decades. It operated for 10 years, during which time the High Roller saw almost 3 million riders. Located 909 feet up and clamped onto the tower's observation deck, the bright yellow and red attraction was the highest roller coaster and second-highest thrill ride in the world. The tallest is its sister ride The Big Shot, which also debuted in '96 and features a rapid ascent from an elevation of 921 ft to 1,081 ft, accelerating to 45 mph and generating 4Gs during the rapid ascent.
By 2005, however, the High Roller was seeming old and underwhelming compared to the next generation of rides, its principal "thrill" being the elevation as opposed to the ride itself, which featured a top speed of just 30 mph, no inversions, not much in the way of acceleration or g-forces, and hardly any drops. Another factor in the retirement of the attraction, however, was the impending $500,000+ makeover needed to keep it in top working condition. At the time, the Stratosphere's director of ride engineering observed, "The hydraulics were antiquated and it required a lot of maintenance to keep it in perfect working order. Even with the overhaul, it still wouldn't be as popular as our other rides."
His point was well-made and the necessity of a major overhaul was rammed home when, on Thursday, Dec. 26, 1996, two wheels fell off the ride, partially derailing one of the cars and bringing the roller coaster to an abrupt halt around 1 p.m. Mercifully, it was possible to evacuate the riders, since it took 4 1/2 hours to repair and get it operational once more. This was the second incident that year involving the High Roller, which in May had been shut down by safety inspectors for 24 hours after a tension cylinder on one of the 15 motors broke off and fell on an outdoor observation deck, cracking a safety-glass window on the 109th floor. These two incidents were enough to seal the fate of the Stratosphere's roller coaster, which was dismantled to make way for newer and more thrilling thrill rides to complement the Big Shot.
The first of these were Insanity and X-Scream, the latter being a 69-foot straight piece of track, similar a conventional roller coaster, but featuring a single car that rolls forward on a pivoting track extending down and over the edge of the building, giving the impression that you're about to plunge headfirst onto Las Vegas Boulevard. Insanity, meanwhile, is basically a typical fairground ride, except it suspends its riders way out off the edge of the tower and then spins them in a circular motion at 40 mph.
When they debuted in 2005, both of these rides experienced problems. First, in April, two girls aged 19 and 11 were left stranded on Insanity for more than an hour when high winds caused an auto-shutdown. Apparently, wind speeds were within the safety parameters when their ride started, but quickly picked up to dangerous levels that triggered the ride's shut-down mechanism; it was meant to return them to safety before closing itself down, however, but instead it froze the girls -- or, rather, left them bouncing up and down in high winds -- as they dangled off the edge of the tower more than 900 feet above the Strip. Yikes!
Then, in November of the same year, a power outage left six Japanese tourists similarly suspended in space on X-Scream, hanging off the side of the tower with an uninterrupted birds-eye view of the street below. It turned out that the ride didn't have manual hydraulics to pull it back in, leaving the terrified riders stuck in their precarious seats for more than an hour until the power was restored.
To the best of our knowledge, however, that was the last occasion on which anything untoward happened, and the latest addition to the family -- SkyJump, which enables guests to descend down the side of tower from an official height of 829 feet in what looks like a cross between skydiving and abseiling -- has operated without incident since it debuted in April 2010. Bottom line, these rides are all inspected before opening each day and have trained operators monitoring their computer controls assiduously for any signs of something untoward. Hence, in reality you are highly unlikely ever to see anything like this hoax Insanity accident video we found on YouTube...
